Biden restrictions on drilling begin to hit electricity prices

 Houston Chronicle:

Texas residents' eyes will likely begin popping this summer at the cost of their incoming energy bills, as electricity prices in the Lone Star State continue to climb to new strata as costs associated with power generation continue to soar.

The average price-per-kilowatt hour of electricity for Texas residents has increased 70 percent year-over-year from June 2021, according to The Dallas Morning News' Mitchell Sherman, who compared new rates offered by state power providers in 2022 to those consumers were offered in 2021. According to Power to Choose, a site through which Texas consumers can compare power plans, Lone Star State residents signing new contracts in June 2022 are paying 18.48 cents per kilowatt hour—10.5 cents more than the averaged rate they were paying in June, 2021 (7.98 cents).

This new price point is the costliest ever recorded since the state grid's privatization in 1999, and experts are expecting consumer rancor as the summer months progress. "We've never seen prices this high," AARP Texas Associate State Director Tim Morstad told Sherman. "There's going to be some real sticker shock here."

The driving factor behind this increase is the skyrocketing cost of natural gas—the largest source of power generation in the state, according to Sherman. Power plants fueled by natural gas make up 44 percent of the Texas grid's energy capacity and are the largest and most readily available source of energy creation in the system, as they do not rely on externalities such as the sun or wind.

The grid's reliance on natural gas, however, has tethered it to a resource whose average price has quadrupled over the last two-and-a-half years. Futures contracts for natural gas clocked in at $2.12 per million British thermal units, its standard measurement, in January 2020. Those prices have since exploded to $8.70 as of June 1, according to Sherman. And this trend, according to a federal report on the short-term outlook of energy production and consumption in the United States, could actually worsen.
...

Prices rise when there is a restriction on the supply of a product like natural gas.  Biden has been restricting drilling and production on federally controlled sites from the Gulf to Alaska. He is pushing reliance on unreliable sources like wind and solar.  It is not just gas at the pump that is going up as a result.  Air conditioning your home,e are charging your Tesla are both going to cost more because of Biden's nutty energy policies.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more

Bin Laden's concern about Zarqawi's remains

James Robbins: ... Bin Laden suggests that President Bush should allow Zarqawi’s body to be returned to his family in Jordan, but this is a matter that is up to the Jordanian government, which so far has not shown much interest in facilitating a homecoming. Bin Laden mocks King Abdullah II, calling him a Coalition minion, and asking “w hat scares you about Abu Musab after he’s dead? You know that his funeral, if allowed to happen, would be a huge funeral showing the extent of sympathy with the mujahedin.” A large crowd would definitely turn out, though most people would be on hand to demonstrate their anger and disgust. Last November’s hotel bombings in Amman , masterminded by Zarqawi, are still fresh in people’s memory, and mentioning them to Jordanians has the same visceral impact as memory of the 9/11 attacks does here. Jordan has adopted a zero-tolerance policy towards those who choose to mourn the country’s least favorite son, and four opposition members of parliament who paid con
Read more